KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Detroit Tigers happened to be in town recently for a series against the Kansas City Royals when the home team honored Mike Moustakas.
The Royals signed Moustakas to a one-day contract so he could retire with them after being a leader on K.C.’s back-to-back World Series teams and the 2015 championship squad. Traded away in 2018, Moustakas played his last game in 2023, and fans packed Kauffman Stadium for the ceremony.
Tigers slugger Spencer Torkelson took note and found it apt that the Royals would celebrate Moustakas, who made three All-Star teams, hit six career postseason home runs for K.C. and made an iconic catch in the 2014 AL Championship Series that lives forever in bobblehead form.
Torkelson doesn’t have those kind of bona fides yet, but at 25 years old, he is a big driver of the Tigers’ offense, posting a .341 on-base percentage, .500 slugging and 15 home runs entering Saturday’s action. He’s among the league leaders in homers, walks, runs scored, RBIs and win probability added. He’s been the one of the top hitters, sometimes the best, for the team with the best record in Major League Baseball.
Torkelson didn’t necessarily make a connection during the ceremony, but something similar to the Moustakas merrymaking could happen for him at Comerica Park some day. Torkelson’s career already shares meaningful parallels with Moustakas. Most notably, both were high draft picks who flirted with going bust, struggling to produce at the plate before being sent back to the minors several hundred games into their major-league careers. Their respective demotions could be described charitably as humbling.
The No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 MLB Draft, Torkelson a year ago this month found himself demoted to the minors for the second time in three years. After ranking as a consensus top-five overall prospect at one time, and hitting 31 home runs with 34 doubles and 67 walks in 2023, Torkelson’s first 54 appearances of ’24 were meager. He slashed just .201/.266/.330 with four homers before the Tigers sent him down.
And yet, before the season had ended, Torkelson was back with the Tigers, ripping doubles in the AL Division Series. Torkelson’s reset, which came 322 games into his major-league career, probably felt like it lasted longer than the 11 weeks he was away.
“It sucks in the moment,” Torkelson told Pitcher List. “No one wants to get sent down when you get a taste of the big leagues. No one wants to go back to Triple-A. But in the long run, I’m going to be very thankful for it because it taught me a lot about myself.
“Getting picked so high and not living up to it really hurt. It was just a matter of throwing the ego out the door and being the tenacious competitor and athlete I’ve always been.”
How he reacted to difficult times, and remained coachable, has told his teammates a lot about Torkelson.
“I love to see guys that have adversity, get punched in the mouth a little bit, and see how they respond,” Tigers ace Tarik Skubal said. “He’s one of those guys that I want to go to war with, that are battle-tested, and I know that they’re going to do everything they can to go out and have success.”
While not his preferred route, being demoted also was the path Moustakas had to take. He was 414 games into his major-league career when the Royals relegated him to Triple-A in May 2014.
“I’m not sure how my career would have progressed had I not gotten sent down,” Moustakas said the day of his retirement ceremony. “Obviously you don’t want to get sent down to Triple-A, but it was an eye-opening experience.”
The Royals were coming off three straight 100-loss seasons when they took Moustakas second overall in the 2007 MLB Draft out of Chatsworth High School just outside of Los Angeles. He didn’t dominate for 2½ years in the low minors, but Moustakas began to rake at Double-A in 2010, slashing .322/.369/.630 with 36 home runs between there and Triple-A.
By the time Moustakas made his major-league debut in June 2011, a consensus of analysts considered him one of MLB’s top-10 prospects. He just didn’t produce like one, despite some encouraging surface numbers, like when he hit 20 homers and 34 doubles in his first full season. Moustakas had fallen into a deep slump when the Royals demoted him in ’14, but really it was worse than just a poor 40 games. From the time of his debut to when the Royals sent him back to Triple-A nearly three years later, Moustakas ranked 108th out of 111 qualified hitters in wRC+.
In part because he was drafted out of high school, the Royals let Moustakas take his time in the minors, giving him about 1,900 plate appearances there. The Tigers acted more urgently with Torkelson, who was 20 years old and had played two-plus seasons in college by the time they drafted him in 2020.
With the ’20 minor-league season wiped out because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Torkelson packed three levels of the minors into 2021, when he slashed .267/.383/.552 with 30 home runs in 530 plate appearances, finishing at Triple-A. That was the extent of his initial minor-league seasoning. The Tigers, starving to win again, didn’t wait any longer.
If he showed warning signs that difficult times might be coming, they were subtle enough for the Tigers to ignore or miss entirely. Torkelson made the Opening Day roster in 2022 but seemed overmatched from the start, slashing .197/.282/.295 with five home runs in 83 games before being sent down at the All-Star break.
Torkelson returned in September and performed better, giving himself a head start on making the team out of spring training in 2023. His arrow was starting to point up again — until he backslid to start ’24. It might have been harder to accept because of expectations, but Torkelson’s hardships weren’t all that unusual.
“Baseball isn’t like other sports where you can see someone drafted first overall, go right to the big leagues and have success,” Skubal said. “Not everyone’s career is like that; success isn’t always linear.”
Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said Torkelson used the additional time with Toledo not only for a mental break but also to work on the same types of things that most players work on at the major-league level. He returned and started for a team making a historic playoff run.
“He had to get better on defense, he had to make some subtle adjustments on offense,” Hinch said. “He had to work on his routines and how he approaches at-bat to at-bat. So there were all these little things that added up to be big things for him to get back to this level.”
The work habits Torkelson improved during his demotion were a jumping-off point for how he continues to prepare. He doesn’t want to be good enough to just get by.
“He’s not too proud to make adjustments,” Hinch said. “That comes from how he was raised, but also how he approaches it day to day.”
Moustakas needed to make similar adjustments upon his demotion to the minors a decade earlier, but he couldn’t reinvent himself at Omaha by hitting .355 over eight games — which is all his demotion lasted. The Royals, who in 2014 were credible postseason contenders for the first time in a long time, needed Moustakas back when his replacement at third base got injured. But the time spent apart from the Royals was, at least, a way for him to get away from going 0-for-4 seemingly every night.
“I knew that I was good enough to play in the big leagues,” Moustakas said. “It was like a refresher. Get sent down, get a little refresher, then be able to go back to the big leagues and not put so much pressure on myself, which was what I always did.”
Moustakas didn’t flip a switch and instantly transform into the best version of himself, but once the 2014 playoffs started, he obviously was making inroads. Moustakas hit five home runs and slugged .558 during the postseason to help the Royals reach the World Series. He also made one of the best plays of the entire postseason, catching a pop-up making a horizontal dive over a railing near the Royals’ dugout. It would have been a long way down to the sunken seats, but Moustakas remembered that the fans below wouldn’t let him hit the ground.
Moustakas never did hit bottom. Overall, he performed his best going forward, slashing .262/.326/.490 with 138 home runs over his next 2,707 plate appearances from 2015-2020.
Moustakas appreciated that general manager Dayton Moore had his best interests in mind by sending him down in ’14. But he also appreciated being brought back quickly.
“I ended up having a pretty good career after that,” Moustakas said.
Torkelson looks back at his own demotion as more like a blessing.
“I’ve kind of seen the highs and the lows early in my career, so I feel like it works in my in my favor,” Torkelson said. “Sometimes people in the game make it look easy, but it sure is not easy.”
Skubal, echoing Hinch, said the lessons Torkelson learned from failure will serve him well the next time he hits a rough patch. Which, in baseball, are bound to come for everybody.
“If you asked him, he probably doesn’t think he’s accomplished much yet,” Skubal said. “He’s so young. He’s got a lot of baseball ahead of him, and he’s going to have a great career. That bat is special, who he is is special, and he works his ass off.”
Hinch said that Torkelson’s career arc can offer lessons to other organizations, media, and fans alike about how young hitters develop. It starts with adding patience and having manageable expectations.
“We’ve sped up development in the minor leagues and gotten guys to the big leagues faster,” Hinch said. “At the same time, the major leagues is evolving into a really difficult place to hit,” Hinch said. “We do need, as a whole, to be more patient with young players as they make adjustments.
“First impressions are not always lasting impressions. Early success doesn’t ensure that you’re going to be that way for the next decade. Rarely in society are we satisfied if we don’t get early returns on young players. That’s pretty unfair.”
Moustakas managed to outlast and outplay the early disappointments. Torkelson is working on it, trying to stay grounded among the peaks and valleys.
“You might feel amazing at the plate and have no success, or you might feel terrible and get a hit, but don’t let that knock you off your approach,” Torkelson said. “It’s just the way this game works. It’s a crazy game. It’s built to mess with your mind, so as long as you compete, have fun and be grateful for every day, I think you can’t lose.”
